Preparing for Lotusphere this evening I thought I'd share a story for Business Partner Tuesday.

Two things happened today. I needed to regain control over my iPhone 3GS - no ring control. And the company formerly known as Facetime is now called Actiance.

Why are these two events related? Well...during the day I read about "Actiance" and this evening I was driven to purchase the iPhone 4 because of "Facetime". Driven. A functioning mute button before LS OGS is a good thing. Of course a working 3GS (one that hadn't taken a couple nose dives down a marble stair case, skidded across parking lots) could have done that trick. But while I'm out buying a replacement phone...I might as well get the latest :), fastest, and as John touted in his tweet yesterday about his new iPhone 4 - most amazing resolution.

Truth be told at the end of it - it was "Facetime" that got me to buy the iPhone 4 vs simply a replacement 3GS. What new Mac convert could resist when you just might have a chance to see your kid's face on your phone? Video was the key differentiator for me. Talk about the best marketing strategy ever....market expansion...kids, grandmas...traveling parents...it's not just the email and internet access anymore driving the device purchase. It is also "remote" family members and friends "closer" in "real-time video". Video. Voice. Video. We have been hearing about video a lot haven't we in our own market space? This entire generation might grow up with it being as common as a voice chat.

Another trend we are seeing is a lot of companies renaming their products (or in this case themselves).

So back to Actiance. The company formerly known as Facetime, whose former name is now owned by Apple, is now called Actiance. Quoting Romeo and Juliet in their blog, they describe what the name means. Pretty creative guys! They bridged a couple of key words that describe what they offer into a new word - ACTIVE COMPLIANCE = Actiance. I have to agree those were the two most accurate words to hone in on. See more about this on their website.

He said: “When we moved our business to UC,
we expected a period of adjustment, but we found that we simply had to
show staff how it worked, and the culture began changing virtually
overnight.”

We've been saying in Sametime for a while that "adoption drives
business value". Here's a real example in the real world. We would love to hear some of your examples of how UC adoption has led to transformation in your enterprises. What are
some of your examples?

For years, Lotus Notes has included a basic version of Sametime. It provides simple presence and text chat within the Notes / Domino environment. For online meetings, voice, video, file transfers, screen captures, mobile clients, browser clients, the gateway for public IM federation, etc, etc, etc, users needed a license to Sametime Standard or Advanced. Yet, for some reason, we never had an easy upgrade path in place. Now, we do.

Buried in the Sametime 8.5 Announcement Letter are these new part numbers:

They let Notes users 'extend' their Notes licenses with Sametime Standard or Advanced capabilities at a discounted price. While the part numbers are in the Sametime 8.5 Announcement, they
can be used for Sametime Standard 8.0.x or Advanced 8.0.x as well. (Just to be clear, these are just for Notes users and you can only extend the number of Notes licenses you have on active maintenance. For users without Notes, you need a regular Standard or Advanced license.)

But, there you go Notes customers, upgrade to Sametime Standard or Advanced today!

"We are proud to recognize winning companies for the sixth annual
INTERNET TELEPHONY Excellence Awards. All the companies recognized have
created IP communications products that have proven to be exceptional
and in the end delivered winning solutions that benefited their
customer," stated TMC's CEO, Rich Tehrani.

The 2010 INTERNET TELEPHONY Excellent Award winners are published in the October 2010 issue of INTERNET TELEPHONY magazine, www.itmag.com.
It's always an honor to be given these awards (and we've won many). But it's even more of an honor when you choose us as your UC vendor. For that we thank you even more.

IBM announced our annual Lotus Award Winners for 2010, as blogged about in the Collaborate for Success Blog. Our Business Partners were a bright spot for us in 2009, and we look forward to even more success in 2010. A sampling of the Sametime business partners who won or were nominated include:

Each year Lotus gives out many awards for best partner, best solution, etc, etc. My personal contribution to award season is the annual Best in Lotusphere Chotski Award. For those of you not familiar with the term, chotski's are the freebie's given out by exhibitors on the show floor. Last year, Premiere Global Services (PGi) won with nerf-like dart guns (great fun with the kids) and chocolate bars. (This year PGi rolled out Sametime 8.5 + their audio conferencing as a managed service... but no great chotski's.)

This year there were two runners up, Polycom and Permessa. On the floor, Polycom was showing their telepresence, voice and video conferencing solutions for Sametime 8.5. Permessa featured their email and instant messaging management and compliance tools (which won the Lotus Award for Best Tool or Utility). Interestingly, both gave away fantastic pens. (Yes, pens.) Permessa went the traditional, but high-end, route with a very substantial silver and black number. This thing is solid. Polycom took a more modern approach with a smooth writing ballpoint with a built-in yellow highlighter.

But this year's winner was clearly Extracomm. Granted, it might have been because I got to them late on the last day... but they were handing out USB Sametime phones, 3D optical mice, iphone cases and golf shirts. Among other offerings, Extracomm produces ExtraTxt and ExtraFax. These let Sametime users send faxes or SMS messages from their Connect client. Check them out.

I don't know if this has been widely shared yet, but as Lotusphere drew to a close, we learned that Akiba Saeedi would be leaving us for a new challenge in IBM. For the past four years, Akiba has led the Sametime product management team with equal parts passion, intelligence, eloquence and tenacity. (Ok... maybe a little more tenacity.) She, Adam Gartenberg and David Marshak were instrumental in reinvigorating the Sametime brand and establishing our Unified Communications and Collaboration Strategy.

On February 1st, Akiba joined the Information Management division of Software Group where she's taking on portfolio strategy for emerging markets and products. Just to show how small IBM actually is (despite its size) one of the products she's taking on is the Infosphere Traceability Server. This was a key component of IBM Solution for Pharmaceutical Track & Trace... which was of the solutions I used to own before coming to Sametime.

In February, we let you know that our long-time leader, Akiba Saeedi, had moved on to new challenges in IBM (A Changing of the Guard). Today, I'd like to share a couple of additional organizational changes with you

First, I took over as head of the Sametime Product Management team in March. I have been extremely lucky to be a part of this team for the past two years and will do my best to clear the way for the real brains in the organization... our product managers Rob Ingram and David Marshak, SUT Offering Manager, Kathleen Cooke and our Industry Solutions/Collaboration Agenda lead, Marlon Machado.

Second, I'm very excited to announce that Jelan Heidelberg will take over for me next week as the Offering Manager for the core Sametime portfolio (Entry, Standard & Advanced.) You may know Jelan as the Offering Manager for Quickr, a role she's held for the last four years. Jelan really knows how to make the IBM machine move and I'm counting on her experience to help us accelerate the transformation that began with Sametime 7.5 and the Unified Communication & Collaboration vision.

Finally, we also have an important addition to our WW Sales Leadership. Rick Schonbrun, a long-time communications industry veteran, joined us in March. Rick was most recently President & CEO of Telovations, a managed services provider "offering outsourced communications services and applications delivered through a hosted SaaS model". He's also had senior sales and marketing roles with Sonexis, Expanets and 3COM. We're happy to have his expertise to guide us as the collaboration and communication markets continue to merge.

I've been reading lots of literature about Communication-Enabled Business Processes, or CEBPs over the last few weeks. Most of it seems to revolve around the notion that CEBPs are nothing but voice-enabled business processes; that all you need to do to enable a business process with communications services is add voice to it. Other ideas around CEBPs call for taking the basic premise of eliminating human latency to the extreme and to actually measure how much a business process can be accelerated through communications enablement in actual minutes. I think both notions fail to present the full dimension of what CEBPs are and why we need them.

I agree that the main purpose of turning a regular business process into a CEBP is to deal with human latency. However, there are business processes in which human intervention is an intrinsic feature and, as a result, expected to be part of the process. I'm talking about processes where human decision-making must be rooted on reflection and careful evaluation of pros and cons, reflection that will invariable manifest itself as latency in the overall business process. I wouldn't mind, for instance, having my doctor taking enough time to evaluate the best treatment options for me or a fund manager taking time to go over a company's books and strategy before investing my money in it. What I would like is for both, my doctor and my broker, to be able to access all the contextual information they need to support the thought process and to have the tools to eliminate latency from their own decision-making process.

I think in these cases the goal behind communication-enabling business processes should be to prevent the process from slowing down as opposed to accelerating it just because faster is better. Doing this requires more than voice, chat and video. It requires a healthy combination of real-time and asynchronous communications and collaboration services to reduce not only human latency where needed but to enhance the context to support decision-making.

I think work styles have a lot to do with the perception that CEBPs are all about voice and reducing human latency. Traditional work styles tend to hover towards extremes: you're either sending email (the most asynchronous way of communication aside from snail mail and fax) or you get on the phone with that person if you can't walk into his or her office. And so, if these are your parameters, that's what you're going to try to optimize. When, on the other hand, you're used to live in a multimodal environment in which chat, voice, a blog post, an entry on a Wiki or a tweet can get you the information you need and when knowing the person who gave you the answer is just there without you having to talk directly to him or her, that's when you realize email and voice alone are way too extreme. Then you learn that just having access to the context in which that person operates can be enough.

Why am I talking about this? Well, this is how we define CEBPs in the Sametime world. We view Sametime as more than just real-time communications--hence the "UC²" thing. We do have the real-time communication capabilities that our competitors have and we also provide the asynchronous and context-based means to provide a better way to do CEBPs through Sametime Advanced and with the help of our sister products and I think we need to talk more about this. I know I should probably write this in a white paper at some point (and I will) but I thought it necessary to rant about it a bit here just to get it off my chest..

I'm working on the slides for the session I'm going to present at Lotusphere 2010. The session title is JMP201 IBM Lotus Sametime for Web 2.0. The session is really about the Sametime platform and the Sametime SDK with an emphasis on the significance of the Sametime Proxy 8.5 Toolkit.

The more I learn about the Proxy and the Proxy Toolkit the more I like it. I honestly think it represents the easiest way to enable Web applications for unified communications services. It's amazing how easy to use the toolkit is. The footprint it imposes on a Web page is minimal and yet it's gentle enough to be fully customizable.

I like the fact that it has an encapsulation layer that makes it backward compatible with the STLinks and Sametime Connect Web toolkits. I also like the fact that, if it detects that the Sametime Connect Client is running on the same desktop as the Web page, all requests go to the Connect Client through the Connect Web toolkit, which broadens the integration picture from Web pages all the way to custom applications through the Sametime Helper toolkit. The possibilities are endless. I like that.

There are going to be several sessions about the Proxy 8.5 Toolkit at Lotusphere 2010. Make sure to check them out if you're interested in learning more. Check out John's December 2 posting for more details.

This week IBM Sametime achieved a major milestone. As you probably know, many companies around the world are still debating whether to embrace iOS as a supported platform for enterprise-grade mobility.

Like all responsible companies, IBM has also been evaluating its response to the overwhelming acceptance iOS has gained among enterprise users. The IBM CIO Office has followed a carefully orchestrated process to determine whether--and how--to embrace iOS. As part of that effort, the IBM CIO Office has been sponsoring a pilot deployment of IBM Sametime Mobile for iOS that enables access to our internal server from iPhone and iPad devices.

This week the CIO Office decided to "graduate" the pilot and enable access to all IBMers. This is a major endorsement for IBM Sametime Mobile for iOS and we couldn't be happier. This puts all our mobile clients: Android, BlackBerry, and iOS, in production-grade status on the IBM IT infrastructure.

As you can imagine--and probably already know--the IBM CIO Office manages one of the most complex IT infrastructures in the world; one that serves over 300,000 users and hundreds of sites around the world. I guess if the IBM CIO Office thinks Sametime Mobile for iOS is good enough for their infrastructure it should be good enough for most.

The Sametime User Experience team is conducting an online survey on Sametime Mobile regarding "Top Tasks for Chat". If you're a Sametime Mobile user we'd love to hear your opinion on what features and usage patterns are important to you when using Sametime Mobile.

Completing the survey takes just a few minutes and your input will be invaluable to us--especially as we continue structuring the plan for our next release. So,if you have a few minutes to spare, please take a look at the survey and let us know what you think. You can find it here: https://www-950.ibm.com/survey/oid/wsb.dll/s/ag470

Y'all (I have to use it here...) may be already familiar with the project our business partner UnifiedEdge has been working on at The City of Fort Worth, Texas. The project is all about outfitting the Joint Emergency Operations Center serving Fort Worth and surrounding Tarrant County with a social communications infrastructure to enable rapid responses to natural disasters and other emergency events in the area. The infrastructure includes IBM Sametime and UnifiedEdge RadioConnect for Sametime.

The story was released as a public reference yesterday. It's a great story that describes a powerful solution that addresses a complex problem in a very elegant way. The benefits are such that you only notice them when they're not there: the solution helps people make better, more informed, wiser decisions in situations when you have to think fast and respond quickly. Check it out if have time. It's an interesting read. You can find ithere.

As we are moving into the fourth quarter of the year, we will have more news to share on Sametime 9... Today, I am sharing a teaser of some of the mobile capabilities that will soon allow you to take advantage of the new Sametime 9 infrastructure that we shipped on September 20th. Come back soon to this site to find out exactly when this will be available in your favorite app. store.

Here is Luis Benitez's recording that he posted on youtube today, and specifically the sequence that starts at 02:44.

Sametime 8.5.2 introduces a whole new set of administrative features at various levels throughout the product. As I mentioned in previous postings, we're committed to make it easier for everyone, from end users to administrators, to take advantage of the capabilities we offer. This includes, of course, making it easy to administer those capabilities as well as the underlying infrastructure.

When we talk about administrative features we're not just talking about "systems administration". We're also talking about things such as administrative tools for meeting rooms, tools to administer call routing and preferred devices within Sametime Unified Telephony, access to persistent chat rooms in Sametime Advanced, etc.

On the systems administration front, though, we did lots of pretty nice things on 8.5.2. As I mentioned in my last posting, we're making it easier to administer how audio and video are deployed and used on the infrastructure. This includes the new TURN Server for NAT traversal and the new Bandwidth Manager component. We're also providing federated deployment capabilities for the Sametime Systems Console, new monitoring APIs and integration with Tivoli Monitoring.

These administrative features are aimed at making life easier for Sametime administrators. The new capabilities such as NAT traversal and bandwidth management are intended to help manage resources in a policy-driven manner that does not require administrators to be constantly tweaking settings. Even installation and configuration are easier in 8.5.2 than in previous versions thanks to this approach of expressing tasks in terms of policies and guided activities.

On the end user side, we are also providing new administrative features as I mentioned above.

Meeting rooms include improved moderator and audio and video controls and a way to explicitly end meetings for everyone when needed. Meeting room owners can designate managers and they can decide who can do what on their meeting rooms effectively administering (moderating is probably a better word in this context) the meetings experience for the people they interact with. On the other side of the equation, systems administrators can now remove meeting rooms directly from the server.

We are also providing capabilities to manage the audio and video experience. Having the ability to integrate dual TCSPI adapters for audio and video conferencing, users can now select the service provider that fits their needs and switch from one call to the next.

Users can also administer their call routing and device preferences for Sametime Unified Telephony directly from the Android devices. This is a first for us and something that truly mobile users will appreciate.

Our new meetings client for BlackBerry also provides administrative features. Users can manage the list of their favorite meeting rooms and the meeting servers they connect to.

We have enabled support for Sametime Advanced on the Sametime Systems Console. This makes our deployment and management for Advanced fully consistent with the rest of the Sametime family, again, to make life easier.

Additionally, we're providing new administrative features to improve chat history management. Users can now search chat transcripts by person and by date and they can also search files and links sent by a specific person. Very handy indeed.

All this is, as I said, aimed at making life easier for end users as well as for administrators. We will continue refining Sametime along these lines to make it even easier to deploy and to use. Stay tuned.

Now that Lotusphere 2012 is history it's time to take a look at what people are saying about it. Before most of us had even made it home from Orlando, the analyst community was already gearing up to comment on what they heard at Lotusphere. So far, the comments have been positive and encouraging. Here's a few that I found interesting:

Let's start with Frost and Sullivan. Rob Arnold's piece has an attention-grabbing title: Is IBM Backing Away from UC? The answer, of course, is no, and Rob gets to that conclusion very quickly when he states that

Leveraging a greater breadth and depth of its strengths, IBM is now
placing the bulk of its emphasis on social business. For IBM, UC has
become a component or a subset of capabilities within social business
environments. Sametime’s IM and presence applications are powering rich
communications, mobile and real-time capabilities within IBM’s flagship
next-gen collaboration platform, Connections.

This is an important acknowledgement. We've been saying for a long time that social interaction patterns provide the natural context for people-to-people interactions; that we've been using them ever since humans learned to communicate verbally and that it's only natural that we should leverage their effectiveness in the enterprise. Integrating real-time communication channels (UC) into our social software is the way to do it.

Art Rosenberg writes in the UC Strategies Blog about the meaning of "Social Business" in What's in a Name? "UC", "Lync" and now "Social Business". The piece emphasizes the UC-enabled nature of our Social Business offerings as a leap forward in the evolution of UC.

Art actually makes that point one more time in a comment on Marty Parker's piece on the UC Strategies Blog: IBM Lotusphere 2012 - Socializing 'Social Business'. Marty provides a thorough report of the conference and highlights the main takeaways of our Social Business message: Reach, Engage, Discover, Act.

All three pieces hit the mark on identifying and highlighting the message we wanted to convey at Lotusphere 2012. I would, however, emphasize that the Reach, Engage, Discover, Act mantra works precisely because UC is an integral part of it. I would argue that, when put in this particular context, the term UC actually falls short and it may be time to come up with some other term that reflects the new normal more appropriately. We're already working on it.

It's 12:26 AM EST in Orlando. Lotusphere is in full swing and I just came back to my room at the Dolphin hotel after attending the Australian Party--allegedly the hottest ticket in town during Lotusphere. I just said good night to my lovely wife and, instead of brushing my teeth and getting ready to go to bed, I'm here writing this post.

The reason I'm doing this is to clarify what Collaboration Agenda means for Sametime. I've been manning the Collaboration Agenda pedestal at the IBM booth and I'm getting lots of questions about what this actually means; questions from business partners, customers and even from IBM colleagues. So, here it goes.

Collaboration Agenda is a philosophy, a way of doing things, a metamethodology that brings together well-known best practices to help customers address pain points with solutions that will save them money and help them make money.

It all starts with industry priorities defined by industry leaders and visionaries. Each industry priority encompasses a series of well-defined pain points that are measurable and quantifiable. Then, based on that knowledge, we apply known best practices to address those pain points with solutions designed to minimize the impact inflicted by those pain points on the customer's business processes and to maximize efficiency and agility. In the case of business processes that benefit from reducing and/or eliminating human latency, such solutions will be based on unified communications and collaboration software.

Devising solutions using the Collaboration Agenda philosophy produces things such as RadioConnect for Sametime, a solution based on Sametime Standard and a soft radio plug-in developed by UnifiedEdge, an IBM Business Partner based out of Round Rock, Texas. RadioConnect was designed with a manic focus on solving a single problem: lack of interoperability among disparate radio infrastructures in emergency response and public safety scenarios and nothing else.

This is what Collaboration Agenda can help us achieve. RadioConnect may not be very sexy--it won't update your Tweeter status or your Facebook wall--but it will help first responders communicate with each other in an emergency situation, which can contribute to minimizing the loss of life and property.

If you happen to be at Lotusphere and would like to have a deeper discussion about this feel free to drop by the IBM booth. I'm going to be back at the Collaboration Agenda pedestal between 11:45 AM EST and 2:00 PM EST today.

As you know Apple is just about to release iOS 8, the latest and perhaps most revolutionary incarnation of iOS. For us this is an exciting event and one for which we're preparing as diligently as we can.

As soon as iOS 8 was made available to the developer community we sat down to test our Sametime Mobile Chat and Meetings apps on it. Unfortunately--but not entirely surprisingly--we found that some things don't work quite as they should on iOS 8. As soon as we realized that we got all hands on deck to fix the problems we found. We're still working on it and it is for this reason that we're asking you to not upgrade to iOS 8 when it comes out this week if you want to use Sametime Mobile Chat and Sametime Mobile Meetings on your iPhone or iPad.

I know; it sucks but the truth is the current versions of Sametime Mobile Chat and Sametime Mobile Meetings won't behave as expected on iOS 8. We've published an official Tech Note documenting this issue. Like I said we've got all hands on deck working on fixing the problems we found and we'll keep you all posted as soon as it is safe to upgrade.

The world is noticing that communication alone is not as useful as when it's done in the service of collaboration towards achieving a common goal--if only talk show hosts would get a grip on that one... but I digress. The point is that communication as an enabler to collaboration actually make sense and people are starting to notice. The steady penetration of social software into business processes proves my point.

I mentioned before we're working with the IBM BPM team in devising integration scenarios for BPM and UC² around a theme known as "Social BPM". We're making good progress along several work streams and we're all very excited about the strength of this story.

Today, an article on Internet Telephony titled Businesses Are Sweet on Social Networking talks about specific case studies where customers are deploying social software to enrich collaboration and bridge gaps caused geography and other barriers. The author has nice things to say about our very own Connections software:

"...one customer is Rheinmetall AG, a German defense and automotive manufacturer. They have deployed Lotus Connections and embedded it into their internal SAP portal to improve productivity across teams, time zones, borders and corporate divisions. They can tap the expertise of their entire organization from the context of their ERP system.”

Another IBM customer is the Practicing Law Institute, which deployed IBM social software last year to support its extranet site for 100,000 lawyers. “The social capabilities allow PLI to not only deliver continuing education to the legal industry more effectively, it also helps strengthen PLI’s relationships with those customers so they visit more frequently,” says Lamb.

When organizations embed the knowledge of employee or customer communities into those applications, adds Lamb, they accelerate adoption, and they can optimize that particular business process. This results in faster time to market, shorter sales cycles, improved customer satisfaction, lower call center volume and other potential benefits, he says.

Sametime and Connections are first cousins who are growing up together. Sametime is about ten years older than Connections and, as a good older cousin, it has embraced its younger cousin. Sametime features integration with Connections both ways, on the Sametime Connect client, and on the Connections user interface as well.

You can get to a person's activities, blogs, communities, etc. on Connections straight from a chat window on the Sametime Connect client: Additionally, you can see a person's Sametime presence and availability status directly from the Connections user interface: In a nutshell, we got this one down. Now we're working on taking it to the next level where social software and unified communications along with BPM software will truly make CEBP happen.

You may or may not remember that we sent out a notification back in April about changes in the way IBM Sametime interoperates with AOL's AIM public IM service. Those changes are effective on January 1, 2015, and I think it's important to remind everyone that this is coming and to go over the changes so you all know what to expect.

AOL is taking over the onboarding and provisioning process to set up interoperability with AIM. This means you will need to sign a commercial agreement with AOL to maintain your connectivity beyond December 31, 2014. We recommend that you contact AOL immediately to start the process. They have set up a Web site for that purpose:

If your users need to communicate with AIM users after December 31, 2014, you need to register your Sametime domain with AOL. You don't have to do anything to your Sametime deployment (this change does not impact the Sametime Gateway in any way) but you need to go through the process with AOL so they can enable their infrastructure to interoperate with your Sametime environment.

You also need to be aware that there is a license fee for maintaining direct federation with AOL. After you send a provisioning request through their website AOL will send you a quote for the service.

AOL needs to complete all on boarding requests by the end of the year. They will start deprovisioning on January 5, 2015 for those companies that do not reach out to them before December 31, 2014.

As some of you may already know, today was my last day as the Program Director for Sametime Product Management. On Monday, I start the next chapter in my IBM career - as the Program Director for IT Solutions for Rational. There, I'll oversee strategy and Industry Solutions for a billion dollar portfolio. I'm looking forward to learning about a new space and leveraging my previous experience in industry solutions. (They tell me I'll be dreaming about DevOps in my sleep.)

I've been a part of this business for a long time and am happy to leave it in very capable hands. Kramer Reeves, the Director of Product Management for Messaging and Collaboration, will take on management responsibilities until he names my replacement (soon from what I hear). The rest of my team will handle the day-to-day activities, with Kramer's support:

William Kulju - Offerings Manager overseeing licensing, pricing, packaging and other business issues.

While I'm proud of all of our accomplishments, Sametime 9 has to be the crowning achievement of my tenure. With its new, streamlined (dare I say, sexy?) user experience, the cutting edge continuous presence video, deep integrations with Connections and incredible mobile clients... I'd put Sametime up against any communications software on the market today. It's been an incredible amount of fun watching customers and partners get so excited over this release. More importantly, the team is building on Sametime 9 and has great things in store for the future. I look forward to watching the Connect 2015 live stream - as a user - to see all the innovations on the way.

Lastly, I want to thank the entire extended Sametime team for their ceaseless dedication and hard work. And to the members of my direct team - both past (Lisa, David, Rob, Kathleen, Akiba, Bruce) and present (Julie, Marlon, Marc & William) - thanks for being great colleagues and incredible friends. I probably would have moved on long ago if it wasn't for how much fun I had with all of these great individuals.

Earlier in 2011, we told you about changes in the way Yahoo! Messenger federates with IBM Sametime. As you may recall, your IBM Sametime Gateway integrates directly with the Yahoo! Messenger servers through a single sign-on capability, letting your employees use their corporate Sametime identity to exchange presence information and text chats with Yahoo! Messenger users. Yahoo! has communicated their intention to shut this service down on or near mid-December 2011.

IBM planned to deliver a plug-in to the Sametime Connect client that would allow users to exchange text chats with Yahoo! Messenger users through a new Yahoo! Messenger IM API. Unfortunately, despite diligent efforts by both parties, IBM and Yahoo! have not been able to agree to terms that would allow us to use the Messenger IM API on conditions that are mutually agreeable. When Yahoo! shuts down their SIP infrastructure this month, your IBM Sametime Gateway will no longer work with that service.

Please note that the Sametime Gateway will continue to function as normal for AOL, Google, XMPP based services, Microsoft OCS and other Sametime communities.

In case you missed the tweeting a few weeks ago, you should know that a new cloud offering for Unified Communications was launched by IBM (it's us) on April 16th. Under the name "IBM SmartCloud Unified Communications Dedicated", this offering delivers a complete communications suite from a private cloud. This solution is built on enterprise-grade software components, such as: feature rich telephony, instant messaging and presence from IBM Sametime and Sametime Unified Telephony, unified messaging from IBM, video integration, and more... A wide variety of communication devices can be made available with softphones, deskphones, and of course, support for smartphones and tablets.

This offering is designed to facilitate the transition to cloud-based telephony, and provides support for flexible deployment models (IBM data centers, or managed on customer premises). This offering is the result of an extended partnership between IBM Collaboration Services (Sametime software) and IBM Global Technology Services (ex: networking and managed services), aimed at delivering a best-of-breed and complete UC solution.

For more information, here is the official IBM announcement (www-01.ibm.com/common/ssi/cgi-bin/ssialias?htmlfid=897/ENUS613-002&infotype=AN&subtype=CA). You can expect more news around this new offering over the next few months.
If you have any questions, please reach out to me, or anyone in the Sametime product management team.

On behalf of the entire IBM Unified Communication & Collaboration organization, I am pleased to introduce IBM Sametime 8.5.2 (Standard, Advanced and SUT). This is an absolutely jam packed release that continues to deliver against our "UC2" vision. More importantly, this release helps position Sametime as a critical part of your Social Business Platform... making it possible to find, reach and collaborate with your colleagues, customers and partners when and how it is most beneficial.

Here's an overview of whats new in this release:

New in Audio / Video (av):

Native and third-party audio and video in browser-based online meetings.Sametime 8.5 made it easy to access meetings through the Connect client or through a browser. Now we've added audio video to the browser experience. You can leverage our own native capabilities (up to 20 people with switched video) or use third party audio, video conferencing and telepresence systems for more robust capabilities. Either way, all it takes is a a small browser plug-in (2 mb).

Standard-based Network Address Translation (NAT) support and Firewall traversal for Audio & Video. This bit of infrastructure makes it easy to use av with customers, partners and anyone outside of your network.

Bandwidth management tools to protect the network by managing audio and video usage. Protect your mission critical applications by controlling how much bandwidth is allocated to av overall, how much is allocated to different classes of users and locations and politely prevent av sessions from connecting if there is inadequate bandwidth.

Support for dual Telephone Conferencing Service Provider Interface (TCSPI) adapters. This enables simultaneous integration with multiple audio and video conferencing systems and gives users the choice of which makes the most sense for them.

New in Mobility:

A new Sametime client for Google Android devicesText to speech reads you incoming messages, embed images in Sametime chats, update your location through the phone's GPS and initiate SUT calls.

A new Sametime Meeting client for Research In Motion (RIM) Blackberry devices

New in Telephony:

SUT Lite Client LicenseAn easy way to get started down the UC path, this new license turns your Sametime Connect client into a simple softphone. It requires minimal configuration (a SIP trunk from the Sametime Media Manager) to make or receive voice or video calls.

Intelligent number recognizers within the chat window. Sametime will now recognize phone numbers sent to you via instant message and let you click on them to dial.

Active speaker notification in ad-hoc conference calls

SUT Dialer on Google Android devicesChange your preferred SUT device and initiate SUT calls while mobile. Call recipients will see your unified number and other Sametime users will see when you are on the phone.

New in Sametime Advanced

An infrastructure refresh that improves both scalability and deployability.Sametime Advanced helps you interact with communities of users (for example, your IBM Connections Communities) in real time. A great way to tap into experts you don't personally know right when you need them.

As if the greatly improved administrative experience, user experience and overall business value from IBM Lotus Sametime 8.5.1 weren't enough (hey, I had a lot of coffee this morning), you might want to also know that IBM has announced that as of September 30, 2011 (over a year from now), IBM will no longer be providing support for Sametime 7 and Sametime 7.5. This should give you, our esteemed clients, plenty of time to upgrade. And remember, if you're on Software Maintenance (and most of you already are), there is no charge to upgrade*: begin planning your upgrade now by starting with Upgrade Central or Planning for migration from an earlier release in the Sametime Information Center.

(*terms and conditions apply, see Announcement Letter for details. I had to say that or IBM Legal would get mad at me).

Help us collect feedback on Sametime 9! The IBM User Experience team wants to know which tasks in Sametime 9 are most important to you and how easy they are to do. Your input is very important to us and will be used to influence future user experience work. The survey will take approximately 20 minutes, but will be very helpful in improving future products.

Our friends at Arkadin have just published a very nice video showing how nicely their audio conferencing platform integrates with IBM Sametime.

Arkadin's Hybrid audio brings Sametime voice and PSTN telephony into an integrated experience right from Sametime Connect and Sametime Meetings. If you're coming to IBM Connect 2014 next week make sure to stop by the Arkadin booth at the exhibit hall to take a peek.

FYI folks. I'll be at IamLUG 2010 in Saint Louis tomorrow and Tuesday. Tomorrow at lunch I'm scheduled to do a presentation about the Sametime Proxy and the Sametime Proxy toolkit at 1:00 PM in Room D. Feel free to drop by if you're interested in the topic or just to say hello. I'll be at the conference until Tuesday afternoon.

I'd like to invite those of you who will be at IamLUG 2011 in Saint Louis next week to stop by Room A on Tuesday at 3:30 PM. This year I'm going talk about how to help our customers make the transition from good-ol' fashioned collaboration into Social Business.

My session is titled Leveraging the IBM Exceptional Work Experience Suite on the Path to Social Business. I'll talk about how we can help customers replace linear collaboration workflows, which is what we've been telling them to do for years (remember Workplace?) with the more natural social interaction patterns that we use in our daily lives as they make their way into the enterprise. The trick to making this transition successful resides in enabling those social interaction patterns from the start. Enablement in this case means giving the people involved the means to find, reach and collaborate with each other using both, real-time, and asynchronous communication channels. I'll talk about positioning unified communications as the connective tissue that makes capabilities such as communities, profiles and Wikis context vehicles for enabling social interaction patterns.

Feel free to stop by. We'll have about 75 minutes to talk about these things. It's going to be fun.

We have great news for you today. Over the week-end, we enhanced IBM SmartCloud for Social Business with a brand new capability: audio-video calling.

First, let’s start with a quick reminder on what you were able to experience in the IBM cloud over the past few month. SmartCloud users have been able to chat with other users, transfer files between each other, and – my personal favorite – they can dynamically select and share a portion of their desktop. So, if I want to quickly show you any part of my desktop, I can do it in one click. And I could perform all of these actions just using a browser or a mobile device.

With this latest update, we are now adding one-to-one audio-video calling to instant messaging. How this works is very simple. Let’s imagine that you and I are starting a chat (of course, with a very polite “hi…”). You will now see two new buttons in your chat window: one to start an audio-video call, and one to start an audio-only call. After you click on the video button, I can accept the request, and both of us can see each other in a quality video call.

And if you - or I - would like to skip the camera – trust me there are many times when I am not ready for it – then we can just talk to each other. From computer to computer. Simple. For that, we both just need a browser.

The mobile client (iOS or Android) will soon be available in your favorite app. store. We will let you know in this blog when it is available for download.

So is this a big deal ?

Oh... Yes… We believe that the use of video is critical to collaboration and social. There are many situations where a quick talk, or engaging in a video conversation, is much more efficient that a text-based chat. Every time you need to show something real (as opposed to virtual…), a whiteboard, a paper-based drawing, or a piece of high-tech equipment, a video is worth a thousand words (and even less when you have to type all these words on your tiny phone).

And there are so many other ways to leverage quality video when you need to better communicate with someone else: for an interview, or for a 1-1 meeting with your new boss... Seeing someone is key to establishing trust, or not…

So, if you want to get a first-hand experience at this new video experience, here is a video interview that was recently recorded.

There is one more SmartCloud enhancement that I will cover in my next blog. For now, go ahead and jump on the cloud to try this new browser-based video experience.

My colleague Louis Richardson over at the Collaboration Soapbox Blog just posted a great entry, Beware brood parasites in your company. Although he wrote it specifically within the context of social software, it applies equally well to the world of unified communications. Many companies have experienced very similar frustrations with their (non-IBM) unified communications deployments. So it bears repeating: make sure the solution fits your business, and not the other way around.

It is with mixed emotions that I'm announcing that today is Bruce Morse's last day with IBM. After 32 years, he's decided that it's time to pursue other challenges and adventures in life. Most of you know that Bruce has led our Unified Communications & Collaboration segment for the past 4 years. But in his 3 decades with IBM he also

helped manage IBM's
S/390 and AS/400 businesses through a number of challenging industry
transitions in technology, computing styles and business models

was responsible for building strategic
alliances as part of IBM's business development initiatives

built the Software Group mergers and acquisition team and played a prominent role
in the acquisitions of Lotus, Tivoli, and eight other software
companies

played a leading role in the
launch and development of the WebSphere Portal business

was a major driver in a number of our software start-up businesses,
including Pervasive
Computing and Software Group Industry Solutions

participated in some really bad skits on the Lotusphere stage. Holy cow they were bad...

The entire UC2 team wishes him all the best and his leadership will be missed.

As for Sametime, the rest of the team remains intact and our focus unchanged. I had hoped to be able to announce Bruce's successor at the same time as his retirement, but that is still in the works. I'll let you know as soon as I am able.

#ucoms #socbiz Before announcing back at Lotusphere 2011 a new compliance solution for IBM Connections, Actiance had been an active IBM Sametime business partner for some time, specifically with their Actiance Vantage for Sametime solution. The addition of IBM Connections to the Actiance Vantage family continues to generate news, with The VAR Guy publishing an August 9 story on Actiance's plans to build a U.S. channel for its compliance software: "The VAR Guy: Social Media Compliance Vendor Builds U.S. Channel".

The collaboration between Actiance and IBM, including integration with Sametime and Connections, is highlighted:

Actiance also partners with IBM, a long-time ally. The companies have been working together in conjunction with IBM’s Sametime unified communications software. More recently, IBM announced plans to offer Actiance’s technology with IBM Connections, a social software product targeting businesses. The resulting product, Vantage for IBM Connections, will let customers archive social media content.

IBM and IBM Business Partner Citent will be hosting 2 live seminars on Unified Communications and Sametime, Tuesday Oct 5 at the IBM San Jose offices (4400 North First Street, Room 1032 Garnet, San Jose CA 95134) and Wednesday Oct 6 at the IBM San Francisco offices (425 Market Street, room 20-240, San Francisco CA 94105). Both seminars will be from 10am to 1pm, and review the features and benefits of Lotus Sametime.

Qualified attendees will receive a half-day Advanced Collaboration Assesment by CITENT’s team of Collaboration Consultants. Please RSVP to Kennedy Cato at events@citent.com or call (714) 436-6100, or visit www.citent.com for more information. If you're in the neighborhood, please RSVP and stop by!

At the GigaOm Mobilize conference recently, IBM Business Partner Plantronics released an interesting study, How We Work, that surveyed
more than 1,800 employees in six countries about their communication
habits and preferences. The results show that workers are increasingly leveraging a diverse toolbox of communications capabilities. E-mail, phone and IM are by no means dead (in fact, usage of all forms of communication has actually GROWN over the past 5 years); however, the more critical collaboration is to success and productivity, the more
people prefer in-person and video-driven meetings over text-based
communication. And SMS and social collaboration have grown in importance as well.

“How
We Work
shows that, given the demands of work today, professionals are
essentially creating communication tool belts that allow them to pick
the right tool at the right time,” said Clay Hausmann, vice
president of Corporate Marketing at Plantronics. “Video, voice and
text-based communications all have a role, as does social media, and
one isn’t growing at the expense of another. The pace of innovation
around new communication technologies is astounding, and yet it is
the end user who ultimately decides which technology will play a key
role in their business communication and for what purpose.”

Interactive Intelligence's partner conference is going to take place in beautiful San Antonio, Texas from October 11 to 13 at the San Antonio Marriott Rivercenter (see here to register if you want to attend).

Yours truly has been invited to do a session on the value proposition behind the CIC-Sametime integration. The session title is Selling Success with CIC and IBM Lotus Sametime and it's scheduled for Monday, October 11 at 4:15 PM CDT as part of the sales and business solutions track. The magic will happen in Salon K-L.

Our friends over at IDoNotes and Plantronics are sponsoring a webcast this week. Tomorrow (Wednesday August 25) at 10am Central US time, please join them for How to Get the Most from your Sametime Client (A User's Perspective). Marie Scott and Tom Duff, authors of a book on this very
topic from Packt Publishing, will show you how you
can effectively collaborate with your colleagues and teammates both in
your organization and outside your organization by using the features of
Sametime. It's practical, down-to-earth, and most of all, fun! Registration is free.

The Sametime Wiki has a new section dedicated to business partners. The section is called, quite appropriately, Business Partner Resources and it will feature content to address issues related to education, deployment, application development, and best-practice advice in general.

Todd Page has written the first article. The title is "Business Partner Enablement Roadmap for IBM Sametime" and it outlines what business partners need to do to acquire the necessary skills to become Sametime practitioners. This is just the first of many articles to come.

Among the various solutions to the "chat-from-a-Web-page-into-the-Call-Center" problem, Zion Software's Instant Help is one of the most elegant ones.

Instant Help is a cloud-based solution that enhances existing on-premises Sametime installations with the ability to communicate with customers and partners outside the company's firewall. It provides the queuing mechanism to route instant messaging requests. It has a skills-based rules engine, a routing engine that takes skills and availability into consideration when routing incoming requests, it has the ability to hold queues when things get too busy, it allows transferring a session to colleagues and it provides redirection options to accommodate changes in staff availability.

I had a chance to see a demo of Instant Help and I was very impressed; good stuff.

This week's Business Partner Tuesday is a day late, but if you saw our earlier post today, you'de know why :-)

Would you like to connect instantly with other members of the Lotus Community? Perhaps your favorite blogger? A presenter you saw at Lotusphere? A Lotus Business Partner? Or even an IBMer? Well the people running BleedYellow.com are helping make this a reality. Here's an easy how-to guide to set yourself up. I've already done it, so you can now connect with me via Sametime (say hi!).

BleedYellow is a public Lotus Connections site, run by IBM Business Partner Lotus911 (now GROUP). So the first thing you need to do, is go there and register. (the Register link is at the bottom left corner, as shown below):

Once you have an ID and PW on BleedYellow, you next go into your Lotus Sametime client, and add an additional community, allowing you to connect to both your company's Sametime server to chat with your coworkers, and the BleedYellow Sametime server to chat with people from all over the world (but you already knew that Sametime client can connect to multiple communities, didn't you...)

In Sametime: - Choose File - Manage Server Communities from the top menu. - Click Add New Server Community - On the Log In Tab, add the username that you registered at BleedYellow.com, and your password. * Note: Some people have told me that they use the email address they registered on BleedYellow with, not their username.

On the Server tab, enter im.bleedyellow.com as the Host Server, and 1533 as the Server community port.

Then click OK at the bottom. Now the last thing you have to do is add a group so you can see the people to chat with. Click on the New icon, and choose New Group:

Select Search for a public group (1), select the bleedyellow community (2), search for the group yellowbleeders, select it (4), and click OK.

I've been working with a lot of people from Denmark lately and I must say it's been quite a rewarding experience. I don't know whether it has to do with the fact that Denmark is one of the happiest places on Earth (it was number one last year) and that state of mind gets to you when you talk to Danish people over Sametime Unified Telephony (it only happens over SUT and TCSPI adapters, by the way) or because we're lucky enough to be working with great business partners hailing from the land of Mr. Andersen.

Convergens A/S is one of those partners. I've been working with them in building a reference for Collaboration Agenda to highlight their CitizenCasePortal, an integrated solution for municipal case workers that features Sametime, WebSphere Portal, Domino and Notes.

Convergens built the solution for a municipality in Denmark to help case workers improve accuracy and delivery of the various services the municipality offers its citizens.

The main selling point of the solution is to, first, present a unified picture of a citizen's case history along with access to the case workers that participated in building that history and, secondly, to give ready access to those case workers in real time.

The solution pattern proves, once again, that communication is only useful in-context. This is a line-of-business application used by task workers that has improved case processing time in about 90% when compared to the time it took a case worker to gather all the information and build case histories from scratch--every time.

The solution has been in production for about two months now and it's already proving to be one of the smartest decisions the customer has ever made, according to their CIO. I could not agree more.

Continuing our Business Partner Tuesdays series, this week we feature Dialogic. They recently announced their Dialogic(R) 2000 Media Gateway to help with the integration of PBX systems with (and through) Sametime Unified Telephony. They also have online training modules to help sales, sales engineering, and installation/support engineering teams get up to speed.

What makes a successful solution ecosystem isn't just the vendor platform, of course, but the business partners that add value to that vendor's platform. In the case of IBM Unified Communications, we have over 400 business partners that make Sametime one of the leading unified communications platforms out there. Here's just a few of those business partners that happen to be exhibiting at Enterprise Connect this week. In addition to stopping by our own booth at 623, please stop by their booths to learn more about what they do, and how they work with IBM.

As I mentioned in a previous post, we've been working with AwesomeBobcatVideos to include Unified Communications videos in her ongoing series of short videos that cover Enterprise
Collaboration as well as other topics.

The third video that I worked with her on as part of this series was just recently posted. Here I talk briefly about why Business Partners are so important to the IBM strategy for unified communications and collaboration. Take a look at the video on YouTube here.

#ibmsocialbizAs many of you know, we've been working with Interactive Intelligence in integrating their CIC contact center suite with Sametime. The integration allows contact center agents to tap into expertise beyond their immediate reach.

The expertise location pattern is critical to improving customer satisfaction, up-selling and cross-selling, and to keeping customer-facing business processes moving. That's exactly what the CIC-Sametime integration does. Our friends at InIn produced this nice video illustrating how the integration works. Take a look:

“Hello? Who just joined?”"Tom, there’s too much noise on your line, can you
please mute your phone?”“Sorry I’m late. I couldn’t find the passcode for
the meeting.”

For those of us who spend all day on conference calls (like me), and as more and more of us work remotely this will be the same for many of you, it would be nice to imagine
a meeting where you could see every participant by name, mute or un-mute
participants’ lines from your desktop, and have the meeting dial out to your
participants. Thankfully, that capability is available today with PGi audio conferencing
integration to Lotus Sametime.

PGi has been integrating with IBM for some time. Their first
TCSPI adaptor was launched in January 2004. Just this January they released their latest conferencing integration to
Sametime 8.5, including Mute/Un-mute, Dial Out, Lock Conference, End Conference and Disconnect User. By
embedding one-click access into web, video and instant messaging collaboration
applications, users can escalate the meeting experience while everyone is
engaged - facilitating quicker decision making and improved productivity.

PGi Global Collaboration
Services provides a wide range of collaboration services. You can learn more at www.pgi.com/gcs.

I had a chance to take some videos around the Showcase Floor at this year's Lotusphere event. I wanted to capture what some of our Sametime business partners were showing off this year. Here's Plantronics talking about their Sametime integrations.

Two IBM business partners I wanted to highlight on this week's Business Partner Tuesdays post.

In the first, Bob Preston over at DiscussUC had an excellent post about Innovation - the Heart of the Matter in Unified Communications. In it, he discusses some of his thoughts coming out of a CIO virtual event hosted by Polycom. John Del Pizzo, our Program Director for Unified Communications Software, was one of attendees joining 60 CIOs from around the globe. Bob's key finding:

...my top take-away from today's event is that innovation is at the heart of the matter. Corporate leaders are beginning to radically rethink how to guide their companies into a new era of economic growth to maximize performance and stay ahead of the competition. Forward leaning executives with the passion to lead have a new opportunity to kick-start patterns of innovation within their organization to stimulate organizational transformation. Tapping the energy, enthusiasm, and power of human interaction to enable a culture of innovation is now THE business imperative for ALL organizations.

This very closely matches IBM's own findings in the 2010 CEO Study, where we found that CEOs of leading organizations are slowly but surely re-orienting their organizations towards growth, and that innovation driven by collaboration and closer customer relationships is core to many of their transformation efforts. As Bob quotes John from the event:

“Collaboration is what we do on daily basis, it’s just what we do, and it needs to be seamless," ﻿﻿commented John Del Pizzo of IBM. "Integrating desktop and mobile devices, UC enabled collaboration becomes ubiquitous and will drive transformative and innovative work flow environments.”

Secondly, my fellow blogger Marlon Machado has just published a joint whitepaper with Brad Herrington, Product Marketing Manager at Interactive Intelligence, Building Customer Centricity through Expertise-Based Interactions (free registration required). This paper discusses the emergence of customer centricity, driven by growing customer sophistication and empowerment across geographies and market segments. It also discusses the need for large and small businesses to embrace customer centricity and to take steps to internalize it as the driving force behind business processes and policies. Not surprisingly, it ties into the same innovation and customer-centric themes talked about at the CIO virtual event.

Blair Pleasant over at UC Strategies recently blogged about a Focus.com IBM and Polycom webcast on video communications in the enterprise. My personal experience has been similar to hers, specifically video collaboration can be both a positive reinforcement AND negative reinforcement of good collaboration behavior and outcomes. On the negative reinforcement side:

One of the strongest arguments in favor of video calls is that
participants are less likely to multitask and do other things while on
the call. If someone is looking right at you, you're probably not going
to be checking your email, playing Angry Birds, or eating your lunch.

And on the positive reinforcement side:

Communication is enhanced. Using video lets you see if someone is
confused, bored, or angry, so you can modify your message and
presentation. Interactions are more personal, which helps to enhance the
quality of relationships between the participants.

Negative reinforcement isn't a bad thing - social mores are just as often about "don't do so-and-so...it's bad manners" as they are about "do so-and-so, it's good manners". Video collaboration is no exception. Personally, I've experienced both the positive and negative reinforcement of good behavior both in work meetings from video meetings. At work we've been (of course!) using video inside a Sametime 8.5.2 meeting for regular weekly meetings, and our team's focus has increased significantly in those meetings. And I've also experienced it outside of work. My personal mobile device is an iPhone 4 and lately I've been using FaceTime to communicate with my spouse, who's recently been in New York while I've been back home in San Diego. The interactions we've had via video on mobile has been leaps and bounds more satisfying than a pure voice call, making the 3000 miles seem a lot less distant.

That personal experience is enlightening. It reminds me that even in business situations, we're still HUMAN. We still want -- need -- visual communication to establish trust and maintain deeper relationships (note that I'm omitting an important conversation on the special challenges faced by the vision-impaired). If Trust is the new currency, then video collaboration will surely be an increasingly important tool in the enterprise.

Today my friend Art Rosenberg wrote an interesting post titled "Short Messaging Service (SMS) winning the mobility battle?" on the UC Strategies blog that, when you see the numbers, really puts things in perspective when it comes to considering the effectiveness of SMS as a communication tool. As it usually happens, the success of SMS stems from its simplicity: it's low-bandwidth, it doesn't require specialized equipment and it just works. Because of its simplicity, SMS can be used as a communication channel but also as an interface to applications in CEBP scenarios. To me, this is where its true potential resides.

In case you didn't know, there's a way to interact with mobile phones via SMS from Sametime. Our friends at Red Oxygen, a company based in Austin, Texas, have developed the functionality that allows a Sametime user to send and receive SMS from a mobile phone into Sametime and vice versa. Red Oxygen provides the functionality as a cloud service and, to a Sametime user, it looks as if he or she were chatting with another Sametime user when, in reality, he or she would be chatting with a bot that does the brokering between the Sametime community server and the mobile phone. This is what it looks like:

Another important part of that
relationship are the many announcements our Business Partners make
while at the conference. Here's a quick highlight of the
Sametime-related partner announcements (if I missed any, please let
me know!).

I get numerous requests for references of Sametime being used in call center scenarios. We've worked with three business partners in building integrated solutions featuring Sametime for call center scenarios.

Two of them are new and are just being brought to market. The third one has been around for a while and it has already garnered many accolades and, with that, some very nice references. I'm talking about Instant Technologies' Instant Queue Manager. Check it out and, more importantly, take a look at these nice case studies.

My session at Lotusphere 2011, AD307 - Application Development with the IBM Lotus Sametime SDK: From Java to Web 2.0 will cover the various ways in which a developer can leverage the Sametime platform to build applications. The idea behind the session is to position the different programming models available within the Sametime SDK in the service of implementing applications for communication-enabled business processes.

The reason to do this is to convey the following message to the Sametime development community: if you want to make money selling applications based on the Sametime platform please focus on integrating Sametime features into line-of-business applications; think of building solutions that will help knowledge workers minimize human latency by enhancing collaboration and task workers eliminate human latency from the business processes they execute on every day. I know a Solitaire plug-in would be nice and cute but chances are no customer will want to buy it.

In order to illustrate this I will go over the integration we did with Ion Objects. I've known the folks at Ion for many years. We invited them to attend UC Summit 2010 back in April to introduce them to the world of unified communications. They understood UC is something they needed to embrace and they did so wholeheartedly. Since then, we've been working together to build one of the most innovative integration patterns I've ever seen.

Ion Objects bases its products in the Ion framework, a Web 2.0 application development runtime that uses the Web browser as its IDE. Developing on the Ion framework is as simple as dragging and dropping objects (Ion objects) on the Web browser. Well, the integration with Sametime is so cool that Sametime is now an Ion object that can be dropped into an Ion application and, when you run the application, the whole thing just works. The integration is based on the Sametime Proxy toolkit and it's designed to produce both, cloud-based, and on-premises applications.

That's all I'm going to say about this. If you want to see more--specifically an actual communication-enabled contracts management application Ion is selling to a high-profile customer in the media and entertainment industry, feel free to attend session AD307. Make sure to check the Lotusphere 2011 agenda for details regarding time and place. See you there.

Join IBM and IBM Business Partner ShoreTel for an informative luncheon and seminar program on
how to drive business value, improve productivity and reduce costs with affordable
and reliable unified communications. Learn how small and midsized businesses can leverage the enterprise- class capabilities of unified
communications through the ShoreTel on IBM Foundations unified communications appliance. There will be three seminars throughout September, and you can attend by registering online here.

It's nice to see products evolving to become richer and to provide more value. Permessa Corp.'s IM Control for Lotus Sametime is one of those products that grows and adapts based on customer needs and, as a result, becomes more valuable with each new version.

IM Control for Lotus Sametime is a solution for compliance and policy. It's also a monitoring tool for Sametime that features four modules:

The IBM Austin Innovation Center will host a Smarter Planet event tomorrow. The theme of the event is "Showcasing IBM Industry Solutions and Smarter Planet Strategy". Sametime partners UnifiedEdge and Amatra Technologies are going to demonstrate their solutions for government and higher education. The festivities start at 1:00 PM CDT.

As some of you might have seen, I've just changed roles here at IBM. I'll still be with the Worldwide IBM Collaboration Solutions marketing team. But now, instead of marketing our Unified Communications offerings, I'll be supporting our flagship Lotus messaging and collaboration offerings, including Lotus Notes, Lotus Domino, Lotus Symphony, and much more. I'm not going far, and I'll always be a huge Sametime fan. But if you see a lot less of me on this here SametimeBlog, you'll know why. And don't fret, we have an incredible bench of UC subject matter experts, from Marlon Machado and Lisa Harris to many more. I encourage you to share and comment on their insightful work.

But before I move over, I wanted to let you know about an upcoming webinar with our Business Partner CDW. On Wednesday September 28 at 1pm Central US, please join CDW to learn how you can affordably realize the benefits of unified communication today without having to rip and replace your current telephony or email systems, with IBM Sametime. As the only UC client to offer complete integration with Lotus Notes, IBM Sametime also integrates with Microsoft Outlook, SharePoint and Office. And whatever your messaging and collaboration environment, you can integrate it with your telephony systems, whether you have an older TDM environment, a modern VOIP infrastructure, or a mixture of many different systems across the organization.

There is no better time to look at IBM Unified Communications with significant discounts available on licensing now. Complete a survey at the end of the webinar, and you will receive a $10 Starbucks gift card, and be entered to win an iPad2. Register today as space is limited. We look forward to seeing you there!

The Orange County Lotus User Group has published it's upcoming activities list, which includes LUG events across California. There are three Sametime-related sessions, so if you're in any of these areas, you won't want to miss these (especially if you're going to miss the upcoming September 14 LUG webcasts we posted about earlier...)

Advanced Collaboration Made Simple with Lotus
Sametime 8.5: Tues, 10/5 at IBM San Jose at 10am

Advanced Collaboration Made Simple with Lotus
Sametime 8.5: Wed, 10/6 at IBM San Francisco at 10am

Caleb Barlow, IBM Director of Unified Communications and Collaboration, has been working the media angle hard since joining our team. Just the latest example after Enterprise Connect, is his appearance on BlogTalkRadio's Unified Communications channel. You can listen to the podcast right from here.

Our good friend Carl Tyler blogged recently about his experience with the Sametime Proxy and its associated Web toolkit. As you all know, the Sametime Proxy was introduced in Sametime 8.5 to provide a way to surface Sametime services into Web applications using Dojo and Javascript. The new Web toolkit replaces the old STLinks toolkit and it's now the foundation for our integration strategy with WebSphere Portal and mobile devices.

If anyone's opinion should be taken into account on these things that would be Carl's. I'm pleased to see that he thinks we did a good job with the Proxy and that he qualifies it as a good replacement for STLinks. Thanks, Carl.

As you may know, I demonstrated our recent integration with Ion Objects at Lotusphere. I blogged about it way back in December and I got a few questions from some of you about the integration. I showed the integration live at the Sametime pedestal at Lotusphere and we're going to do the same at Enterprise Connect. This time, though, we're going to demonstrate the integration at the CEBP pedestal.

John Kotch, Founder and Chief architect of Ion Objects is going to stop by the CEBP pedestal throughout the week to hang out and talk about the many cool CEBP applications they're planning to offer their customers now that Sametime is just another object in their framework.

Make sure to stop by the CEBP pedestal if you want to learn more. Here's a short overview of the integration:

If it's a little quiet around the office today, it's because many of us will be out volunteering at local charities and other organizations as part of the IBM Centennial's Celebration of Service. For example, I will be helping package and deliver food at a local Food Bank here in San Diego. Caleb Barlow is doing some very interesting work over at the UN:

And many more of our team will be out there as well. Watch the Twitterverse for #ibm100 and #cos hashtags to see what's happening, or go to the IBM Celebration of Service page for maps and other fun facts on the impact we're having in our local communities. It's not too often you get to be part of a company, let alone a tech company, that's been around for 100 years. And it's even more rewarding when the leadership of the company decides the best way to celebrate is to give back to the local communities that we're part of. And for a company that does business in over 160 countries, that's a lot of communities!

If you're not familiar with Greenhouse, it's a live community where you can use Lotus Collaboration products for free. And now it features the first public beta of Sametime 8.5 Online Meetings. You've seen the tweets from members of the private beta... and now you can see what all the buzz is about!

"Sametime 8.5 Meetings are an entirely new way to collaborate with others online. They are incredibly easy to use. Fully integrated into the Connect client you already use for chat, they make it simple to join a meeting with a single click; invite others by dragging their names from the contact list; upload materials via drag and drop; even share your screen from the Macintosh operating system. Of course, not everyone can participate via a Sametime Connect client, so 8.5 includes a zero-download, firewall friendly browser client as well.

Sametime Meetings are different. Meeting rooms are reservationless and don't need to be scheduled. They can be instantly created and linked to calendar invitations from Lotus Notes and Microsoft Outlook. Sametime Meeting Rooms can also be persistent. You can use the same room over and over for regular meetings and keep frequently used materials on hand during the course of the project...."

Greenhouse will be updated with additional capabilities that are part of the 8.5 release over the next month or so. Come on over and tell us what you think!

If you're interested in providing input to our designers about things you would like to see Sametime do in the future, please make sure to check out and comment on the Sametime Design Blog on IBM developerWorks. This blog is maintained by our user experience team and they use it to run their ideas by the Sametime developer community and to brainstorm on how to improve the Sametime user experience.

Under the "better late than never" section: Bruce Morse, VP for Unified
Communications Software, had the opportunity to talk with Roger Green of
CIOZone about IBM, unified communications and collaboration, the
intersection with social collaboration, and other issues. The first
interview was from Enterprise 2.0 San Francisco back in November (Part 1
video linked here, Part 2 video linked here) while the second was at
Lotusphere 2010 in January (Part 1 video linked here, Part 2 video
linked here). Some key highlights:

"...from our point of view, communications and
collaboration, enterprise communications and collaboration is really
about connecting people together in the context of the work that they do
every day. It's really not about voice or about any particular
communication media. It's really about using all of those capabilities
along with things like social networking that allow you to connect the
best people together that have the expertise to be able to resolve
issues quickly, et cetera." - Bruce Morse

Don't miss this new and exciting Webinar on December 12. John Del Pizzo and Any Sanyal will talk about Sametime 9 and how it can help your organization make better decisions, get more done with less, move faster and, ultimately, save money.

Join us on December 12th at 11:00 am EST to see how your organization can take advantage of the next-generation capabilities in Sametime v9.

Over the past couple years in my role as Product Manager for Rich Media in Sametime , I’ve been excited about the great new video capabilities we were introducing in Sametime 9 and the business value the continuous presence experience could bring to our customers. However, I must confess that I was less than enthusiastic about using it myself. Certainly not the endorsement you would expect from the Product Manager – but hear me out.

Like many people, I don’t particularly like being on video. Maybe it’s due to feeling self-conscious or maybe it’s just a generational thing. Face it, I’m not only over the hill – but I’ve made a good start down the other side! However, sometimes in life you’ve got to do things you’re not comfortable doing – and as Product Manager for Rich Media, this was one of those times.

I started using our new video platform as soon as it was ready – okay, even before it was ready. In the beginning, the main purpose was testing. We would initiate a video call, wave at each other, ask the proverbial question “can you hear me?”, and hang up shortly thereafter. We were still falling back to telephone calls and dialing into an IBM conference bridge for most of our discussions.

As we got into the beta stage, within our Product Management team, we started using it more frequently for real conversations. The discussion might be as adhoc as “Are you seeing this behaviour in the Sametime 9 client?” – but instead of simply IM’ing or making a Sametime Unified Telephony call, we actually initiated an AV call. With the Sametime 9 Connect client, it’s a single click to escalate a group chat into a multi-way video call.

It wasn’t long before we were using Sametime 9 Meetings with AV for our regular team meetings. I would typically undock my video window to move it to my second monitor, allowing me to maximize the shared content pane on my laptop screen (perhaps another generational thing...). As a team that’s distributed across the US and Canada, we don’t “see” each other regularly. With video, the experience became more personal - we had a chance to see each other’s workspaces, we learned who talked with their hands, and we were able to quickly see when someone was in agreement or possibly confused. Most importantly, our interactions became more engaged.

Like many people in other organizations, IBMers are guilty of multi-tasking. When talking on the phone – or participating in an audio conference call – it’s common to try to respond to that urgent email or polish up that slide deck needed by the end of day. It takes resolve to ignore everything else – and truly focus on the current topic and conversation. I found continuous presence video can quickly have a big impact on reducing the multi-tasking and improving the focus in the discussion and result in more effective meetings. There are a couple reasons - first by seeing the speaker and other participants, one’s attention is drawn to the meeting and visual cues and body language become part of the communication. The other reason? Well when one is on video, one is less likely to multi-task as others on the call will detect the lack of attention. In some ways, video is an added dose of resolve!

John Del Pizzo and I started using Sametime 9 video for our weekly 1x1. The more we used video, the more natural it became – and the experience was much like we were sitting across the table from each other.

We even conducted our Sametime 9 Analyst Briefings on the Sametime 9 Beta platform in IBM Greenhouse using video. The new browser support allowed analysts to join from their Mac or Windows machines as guests. After installing the Sametime plug-in, the analysts were able to participate in the continuous video experience with John, Kramer, and me. With Sametime 9, Mac users can choose to use Apple Safari or Mozilla Firefox – and Windows users can choose between Microsoft Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox, or Google Chrome. The new browser support combined with the new built-in extranet model also enables Sametime customers to include external participants in video meetings.

The new video capabilities in Sametime 9 are something you need to experience! I’ve provided personal examples of the value it can bring, but don’t take my word for it. A recent survey by Polycom and Wainhouse is worth reviewing (find it here: http://tinyurl.com/nfbceve). A couple key points to note from this survey. First, the biggest value most respondents attributed to video was the ability to improve productivity and to increase the impact of discussions. Second, the survey showed that those users that use video conferencing are likely to use it on a daily or weekly basis.

Clearly, my experience supports that second point. Once someone begins to use video, even a skeptical user like me, the value of the experience quickly overcomes the hesitation. Eventually, even I stopped glancing at the preview window – and put my focus on the other video participants – and the “real face to face communication”.

Let me share a few observations from my personal experience with Sametime 9 video in IBM.

Initiating a Sametime AV call is easy and quick! You will not have time to swap that heavy metal t-shirt you’re wearing for that light blue button down shirt hanging in your closet, so think ahead.

You never know which executive or customer may be on the other end of that “video call” invitation you accept (… in your role as Product Manager for Rich Media)… dress appropriately.

If you are someone who likes to pace while you are on a call, you may want to invest in a wide angled camera for your laptop.

It’s amazing how many people wear baseball caps at their desks!

I will be following up in the next few weeks with some additional entries about the Rich Media capabilities in Sametime 9, so please check back. If you’re curious about what’s coming on our mobile platforms to support these new video capabilities – see Marc Pagnier’s post earlier this week which shared a video with some sneak previews – and stay tuned on this blog for more details coming soon!

Constellation Research recently published a report, "Best Practices: Demystifying The Cost Structure for UC Solutions", by Elizabeth Herrell. This report identifies how leading vendors price their UC solutions and
identifies what is included as core and optional for leading UC
vendors. It also includes some positive comments about the IBM Unified Communications and Collaboration solution and our pricing model. We encourage you to take a look (subscription required).

A recently released video where John Glowacki of CSC, and Rob Schoenfelt of Celina Insurance discuss how IBM Sametime and IBM help them drive real business benefits from becoming more social businesses. Also included is Steve Ressler talking about how IBM helped GovLoop as well.

So you want an easy entry point to bring VoIP into your enterprise? As you heard from our May 18 announcement, we added the IBM Sametime Unified Telephony Lite Client license to our Sametime product family. This easy-to-deploy VoIP solution quickly adds many softphone capabilities directly to your users' desktops right from their Sametime Connect client. We just posted a demonstration of how this works to YouTube. Take a look, and let us know what you think!

Brian Pearson, IBM Executive Collaboration Solutions Advocate, has been building out a "Social Business Everywhere" video series. As part of that, he just released a 3-part demo video series showcasing IBM Collaboration Solutions integrations of IBM Sametime, IBM Connections, IBM Lotus Quickr and more to Microsoft productivity applications, including Office, Outlook and SharePoint. As Brian states in the opening of Part 1:

"...we believe collaboration isn't encapsulated in a single product or single site; as this demonstration will show, we believe in bringing collaborative services to the environments in which you work: in this case, Microsoft tools."

With these videos, you can see IBM's continued commitment to supporting a "social everywhere" environment. supporting multiple platforms and environments.

Part 1 opens with an overview of the IBM integration value proposition, and moves into integration of IBM Sametime presence, chat, web meetings, and audio and video, into Microsoft Outlook.

Part 2 looks at Sametime Unified Telephony integration with Microsoft Outlook, and moves to Social Applications in Outlook, including IBM Connections and content management.

Part 3 looks at integration with Microsoft Office, content management in Windows Explorer, and integration with Microsoft SharePoint.

Lotus Education has put together a new course on "Demystifying Sametime 8.5: Designing and Deploying a Sametime 8.5 Infrastructure". "This webinar brings together multiple Sametime experts, sharing their knowledge and best practices to help you design, deploy, install and administer a new or upgrade an existing Sametime 8.5 Infrastructure. Get a jumpstart on your Sametime 8.5 education today!"

Sametime will have presence ("presence"... get it?--I know it's cheesy but just had to point that out) at the upcoming IBM Exceptional Web Experience Conference (Buena Vista Palace Hotel, Orlando, FL May 16-19).

Session TECH-P08: A Superior UC Experience on the Web with Sametime x.y.z will dive into the details on the upcoming announcement on Social Business scheduled for Wednesday, May 18 at noon Eastern Time. The session is scheduled for 1:45 PM at the Scotland A Room. Yours truly will present. Don't miss it if you happen to be attending.

Cleaning up through some leftover actions from the excellent Enterprise Connect 2011 event a month ago, I found some videos taken by our irrepressibly upbeat Brent Wolfe, Worldwide Business Development Executive for Unified Communications. He had the wherewithal to bring his portable video camera and captured a few IBM Business Partners showcasing their technologies on the Expo Show Floor. I just posted them to YouTube and embedded them here, in no particular order.

IBM (booth 623) also has a Theater where we will be presenting various highlights of our unified communications solutions, along with selected IBM Business Partner solution overviews. Here's today's Theater schedule. Today's theme: "The Cloud". Please stop by!

One of the great things about a blog is you can quickly experiment with editorial calendars. A month ago I started the Friday Funnies postings, where I try to inject a little humor into the Unified Communications market. This newest series I'm calling Business Partner Tuesdays, where I would like to feature a specific member of our loyal and critically important business partner community. If any partners out there have some interesting things they're like to share about being a Sametime partner, from customer references, new integrations, new technologies, partner success stories, or more, just send me an e-mail (just click my name above).

This week I wanted to showcase an upcoming presentation by Epilio (sponsored by LotusUserGroup.org and Plantronics), a business partner who has written many interesting plug-ins for Sametime. Carl Tyler will present "Two tin cans and a piece of string? Sametime can do better than that!" virtual event, June 10 at noon ET (registration link here). The focus will be on features and capabilities that customers are using to make their employees lives
easier. If you're confused when you hear
Sametime, VoIP,TCSPI, SUT, and Lotus Foundations Reach in the same sentence,
then this webcast is for you. Registrants are entered to wina Plantronics Plantronics Voyager PRO UC wireless Bluetooth headset
(drawing void where
prohibited, see rules for details).

I'm about to embark on some design work regarding security models for online meetings. This is an especially fun and challenging design task, since we have many possible options, but presenting them in a straightforward, uncomplicated way to end users can be tricky.

I'd love to hear from some of you regarding which online security capabilities matter most to you, and why. Here are some capabilities that come to mind:

Meeting rooms that are hidden (i.e., people can't find them by searching, except by exact match)

Meeting room passwords, including rules around when they expire

Only authenticated users can join

Meeting participants can join only if the meeting room owner is in the room

Meeting room access control lists (you can only join if your name is in the list)

Speaking of business partners, FaceTime has built a very nice solution that adds considerable value to Sametime deployments in various industry scenarios with high security and regulatory compliance requirements.

FaceTime for Sametime augments Sametime deployments with hardened compliance for regulatory and e-Discovery. It provides tamper-proof logging, it provides a framework for defining ethical boundaries, it allows exporting Sametime file transfers to IBM Enterprise Content Manager and it adds an e-Discovery user interface to facilitate searching and reviewing.

When it comes to security, the solution adds protection against viruses and worms for instant messaging sessions. When it comes to data loss prevention, it scans file transfers over IM sessions and it allows filtering file transfers by keywords and regular expressions.

Regarding management, the solution allows controlling availability of features (IM, VoIP, video) on a per-user basis and it provides a rich reporting framework that allows retrieving conversations as they occurred.

In short, wherever there's a need for IM archiving and compliance, security and data loss prevention on IM sessions, enforcing compliance, ethical boundaries and communication policies, I think FaceTime for Sametime is a a good way to go.

The Vantage policy framework allows granular policies to be defined between groups of employees and for communications with non-employees through federation and external connections. Vantage enables the management of users outside of the organization through expanded inter-group policies, domain-based groups or through the concept of registered non-employees – protecting and restricting communications by employees with unregistered individuals.

Today instead of giving you something to make you smile (or just roll your eyes) I would like to, instead, ask you, dear readers, a couple of questions.

I'm interested in your opinion because, first of all, I'm very curious about the make-up of the readership of this blog and I hope your feedback will give me a better idea of who actually reads this stuff. Secondly, because I think these are fair questions to ask.

The only thing I can promise you to do with your feedback is to internalize it and use it to enrich the awareness I rely on to nurture my decision making. If you feel so inclined as to indulging me with your feedback please feel free to comment on this post.

The first question I'd like to ask is: What's your take on the direction we're setting for the Sametime platform vis-a-vis CEBP? If you recall, our take on CEBP basically says that CEBP is about collaboration facilitated and empowered by unified communications. Moreover, we're saying that, to be effective, CEBP must be intimately linked to business process management (BPM). We call the whole thing BPM + UC² = CEBP and the BPM world looks at it as "Social BPM" (see this post for more on the philosophical underpinnings of this rationale).

My second question is: Do you see things such as CEBP and Cloud being delivered exclusively through the Web browser? The reason I'm asking is because we're seeing the Web browser as the easiest way to implement many of the CEBP scenarios we're working on. We're working with the WebSphere Portal team in building templates for industry use cases in banking, retail and insurance and a few work streams we're pursuing with the IBM BPM team and a few select business partners are also centered around Web browser interfaces. I'm also noticing the emergence of an unwritten assumption that everything coming from the Cloud must be delivered through the Web browser.

I don't think this should be the case because not all applications are suited for the browser--especially in situations involving task workers. I happen to believe the idea of heterogeneous mashups--the kinds of applications you build using Lotus Expeditor and, by extension, the Sametime Connect client--is also a viable proposition for both, CEBP and Cloud alongside the Web browser particularly for task workers.